Helping you get your shit together

What does every successful person in the world and you have in common? Time. We all have 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. No more. No less. Every hour that ticks away unused is gone forever. This is true for everyone. Every successful person. Every failure. You get to decide which one you are going to be.

Look at all that the most successful person you can think of has accomplished. Really try to list off all of their successes. All of their accomplishments. You have the same amount of time as this person. 24 hours a day. 365 days a year.

We all have enough time to be very successful at that one thing we really want to do. The problem is that we don’t have enough time to be successful at everything we may want to do and we don’t have enough time to be amazingly successful AND to throw away too many hours on non-productive activities. Not having enough time for your main passion means you haven’t given your passion enough of a priority. You are allowing too many other goals or pleasures to interfere with your productivity. A lack of time means a lack of priority.

A tool that can help you be more focused on your priorities is the Time EDIT tool. This tool graphs that tasks that are taking up your time on a chart comparing “your level of influence over the outcome of that task” and the “level of importance to you” of that outcome. This will put your tasks into one of four categories: Eliminate, Delegate, Investigate and Transform.

Eliminate: those items that you have little control over outcome and the outcome is of little importance to you. That is any amount of time you are putting into these tasks are a waste of your time and energy. Simply stop doing as many of these as you can.

Delegate: those items that you have a lot of control over the outcome but the outcome is of little importance to you. Some of these items can be eliminated but you can also delegate these tasks. In a home life, you can ask spouse or children to step up and take over. In a professional life, you can attempt to delegate these tasks to other team members. The important thing to save your time is to really delegate these tasks. The outcome isn’t that important to you, so don’t micromanage. It is ok if the person who steps up doesn’t do it as well as you or simply does it differently.

Investigate: these are tasks that are very important to you but you have little control over the outcome. These tasks have a huge ability to drain your hours, your energy and your sanity. With these tasks, you need to really consider if the outcome really is that important to you and what about the outcome is important. It may be you can get that satisfaction with a task that you can influence. Alternatively, ask yourself who does have the influence over the outcome? Why is that? It is their abilities, their position or something special about them. Can you learn those skills or create a situation over time where you can have more influence. Additionally, can you speak to the person who does have influence. Can you influence the influencer. If you can’t change the situation, then consider if you can minimize your efforts here. It might not be worth the heartache.

Transform: this is the perfect combination of where you have the ability to influence the outcome and the outcome is important to you. This is where you want to spend your time. These tasks have the ability to transform your life. Double down on the tasks that fit here.